In our search for the unusual or interesting among the world of operating systems, it might seem unexpected that today’s choice for a Daily Driver is the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Aside from Hackaday perhaps having a larger than average percentage of viewers using Linux based operating systems and generally catering to open source enthusiasts, there’s hardly anything special about Windows, is there?
Oddly for me there is — because while it’s a common enough OS for the masses, the last time I had a Windows computer it ran XP. That venerable OS is a world away from today’s Windows 11, and thus as someone who’s exclusively sat in front of a GNOME desktop for much of the last two decades, it’s an entirely new operating system.
There’s no doubt that it will make a Daily Driver, because of course I’ll be able to do my work on it. Where the interest lies is in seeing what Windows has become. Is it still a useful general purpose operating system, or has it become the locked-down walled garden of crapware that its detractors warn you about? Time to dive in.
A Secret Windows Machine
I have had a Windows partition on this machine since I bought it back in 2024. It’s an ex-corporate laptop from a reseller, and those machines always come with a too-small flash drive and a Windows install. So when I bought a new much larger drive for my Linux install I dropped the Windows partition on it too. After all, you never know when you might need Windows for something, right? Two years later and I’ve never touched it, so my first task in my Windows 11 is to run a system update. I timed the start to 16:30, and left it running. I have a gigabit fibre connection so it should be quick, shouldn’t it. At 19:16 I was finally able to use the computer, but even then Microsoft wasn’t quite finished. There were a slew of permissions choices where I had to opt out of their various data slurps, and their offers and mail.
